The Thriller Rule

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. My rule for picking out good thrillers is this:

When in doubt, pick the thriller with the most ridiculous premise.

 

Five Thrillers

I’ve read so many cheap thrillers that arrowing it down to just five I’d recommend right off the bat is difficult, but here they are:

Team Yankee by Harold Coyle

This is one of the best Cold War hot books I’ve read. It showed me the perils of box-check thinking, because on paper it has every indication of the kind of “Boom boom goes the tank” clunkfests I’d read on the internet. Yet in practice, it’s a smooth-flowing tale that illustrates the best possibilities of the genre.

The Alpha Deception by Jon Land

All right, so most of Jon Land’s books, especially the Blaine McCracken ones, are goofy, crazy, ridiculous and fun. It was very difficult to select the goofiest, craziest, most ridiculous, and most fun out of them. But if I had to, I’d say The Alpha Deception, because Land pulls out all the stops, even by his standards.

Burmese Crossfire by Peter Nealen

Take a love letter to the “Men’s Adventure” books of the past. Now instead of a revolving door of  for-the-money ghostwriters who glanced at one issue of Guns And Ammo, take a veteran with heart and a knowledge of when to be grounded and when to be bombastic. The result is something excellent.

Tin Soldiers by Michael Farmer

Ok, so this is driven up by context, because a 2000s technothriller is surrounded by mediocre-to-terrible neighbors. It also has its share of problems. But it manages to do right what a lot of other thrillers did wrong. This is no small feat, and it’s the technothriller book from that time period I’d be the likeliest to recommend.

Valor’s Choice by Tanya Huff

A military science fiction book that has almost none of the baggage associated with the genre. This, apart from being good (if a little derivative-you’d know the movie/historical battle it’s inspired by very quickly), is one of the best cases of a fresh face revitalizing a genre.

 

The Megabinge

Around this time last year, I began reading Total War, the first book in Jerry Ahern’s incredible, and incredibly ridiculous Survivalist series. I ended up wolfing down all of the 27 numbered books there. Since then, the closest I’ve come is Jon Land’s Blaine McCracken series, but that’s eleven books and I read them over a (somewhat) longer period.

I’m wondering if I’ll ever megabinge something like the Survivalist series again. I’d need a series that, besides being long, had these factors.

• Was well written enough to keep me following it.
• Had a serial format and a overall plot interesting enough to keep me following it.
• Didn’t face competition from another author/series.

So I haven’t slopped into the mood, but you never know…

Reading SEAL Team Seven

The SEAL Team Seven series, two installments of which I’ve reviewed on Fuldapocalypse, is interesting. It took two declining genres-the military technothriller and the pulp action written by multiple authors under one house name-and managed to last quite a while.

For such a giant series, I’m following my rules of thumb for any series that isn’t in strict chronological order. When in doubt, pick something with either the most interesting blurb/premise, or one where there was a key change. First I read the initial installment. Then I read a book that had both an interesting blurb and was the first book not written by the original author, William Keith.

So far I’ve been quite entertained by the adventures of Blake Murdock (how’s that for a main character name) and his team.

Northern Fury reviewed on Sea Lion Press

This is considerably after the fact, but I figured I’d point it out anyway: Northern Fury: H Hour got an excellent review on Sea Lion Press.

As a partial aside, I’ve said it elsewhere but I’ll say it here-I have a renewed willingness to read and review “traditional” World War III stories. Part of that is quality books in the genre like Team Yankee, Red Army, and yes, Northern Fury: H Hour.

Vangelis’ Alpha

One of my latest musical obsessions has been Vangelis’ Alpha.

I like instrumental electronic music and have liked a lot of his past works. Apart from being well-written and catchy, this has one of my favorite musical trends-the slow start that gradually grows more and more lush. Alpha concludes with a massive triumphant blast of synths.

The cosmic theme of its original album fits perfectly with what feels like a journey through an increasingly beautiful landscape until the full wonders of the universe suddenly come into view.

Review Cravings

My latest Fuldapocalypse “craving” was thrillers written in the 2000s. As it was not a good decade for that genre (for reasons I’ve explained before and might explain again), why did I go there? It didn’t feel like I wanted a change of pace, as they were stylistically similar in large part to what I’d been reading before and after.

My review craving for low-list 2000s thrillers was probably because I wanted to see “were any worthwhile?” and “if they were bad, how were they bad?” And the answer can be seen in the reviews themselves.

The Spacesuit Commando ‘Genre’ of Books

I’ve mentioned what I call the “spacesuit commando” genre on Fuldapocalypse before. It’s an arbitrary, slightly snide term I’ve made and used for this type of lowbrow military sci-fi I’ve read far too much of. If I had to give a definition, it’d consist of…

 

• The background is dystopian, often excessively and pointlessly so.
• The characters only use power armor that doesn’t seem to actually do anything.
• The main character is either explicitly placed in a SUPER SPECIAL SPACESUIT COMMANDO unit, or whatever unit he ends up in is treated like a SUPER SPECIAL SPACESUIT COMMANDO unit, even undeservedly.
• There’s excessive training sequences, checking the “I read Heinlein” box.
• The main character gets promoted ridiculously high ridiculously fast.
• A lot of the dynamics (for lack of a better word) feel weird, like the author didn’t do the most basic research.
• The antagonists have absolutely no development whatsoever, even by the low standards of cheap thrillers. The generic “eat everything bugs” are actually slightly better in that it’s at least justified in-universe. Human/sentient opponents are painted with the same brush.

 

And yet, “spacesuit commando” stories are the ones I do read en masse. Part of it is just accessibility (most of them are on Kindle Unlimited, and there’s a “feedback loop” of getting more spacesuit commando books in my recommendations once I’ve gotten several). Part of it is that a story can have many elements of it and still be good (or at least better than some of the others). But the most ridiculous side of me likes them because of the formulaic cheese if I want an absolutely mindless read.

Some appeal after all

A lot can change in a while. About a year ago, I wrote a post where I held that special forces held little appeal to me. Now, after reading my share of “commando fiction” (for lack of a better term), I’ve grown fonder of it and fonder of “special forces” characters.

I guess I’ve just had the fortune of seeing them done better than the few examples I’d seen before.

A Pleasant Result from Fuldapocalypse

So, after a few months of reviews on Fuldapocalypse, I can say it’s helped me a lot. It’s made me realize I was looking at WWIII and military fiction in too narrow a light beforehand, and my resulting broadening of scope has been very good for me, and (I hope) very good for the blog as well.

The kind of impression I had going into the blog was that I’d be reviewing on a pretty narrow spectrum, with the sort of Hackett-style more pseudo-textbook on one end and the Chieftains/Team Yankee style story on the other. And most of my reviews still fall at least somewhat into that category.

But I think two things have influenced me more than just a simple bean count of what reviews were “conventional” World War III fiction and which ones were not. The first is that when it comes to me looking for new stories, as opposed to existing ones, I’ve been steering myself away from stuff that appears too cliche and Hackett-knockoff-y. Is reading something that’s going to be dry and infodumpy and then saying it’s dry and infodumpy really going to be productive or enjoyable to me or a reader? Especially if I do it several times in a row?

The second is the more pleasant surprise I’ve gotten, and that’s that moving away from internet, I’ve seen more characterization and more plot/setting diversity even in the ones I’ve already read. Granted, I had low expectations, but still. There’s that, and then there’s some of the stories moving outside the narrow corridor acting as a “springboard” of sorts for me to read even better and more different cheap thrillers.

So Fuldapocalypse has helped reinvigorate my interest in a genre I thought I knew, explore subgenres I didn’t, and made me rethink some of my critiques. I hope my readers have found it just as fulfilling.